Content Discovery Engine Thoora Shutting Down

The content discovery engine Thoora  has announced that effective December 15th, 2011 it is shutting down its website, the API,  Wordpress widget, and Android tablet app.  In a email to its members the Thoora team bid their members goodbye,

“We would like to thank each and every one of you for participating in this crazy journey with us. Your engagement with Thoora and your feedback have been remarkable, and we have loved learning from you. We definitely wouldn’t have gotten as far as we did without you. We will leave the service running until noon EST December 15th, 2011. At that time we will suspend it indefinitely. This includes the website, the API and WordPress widget, and the Android tablet app. You will automatically be unsubscribed from our mailing list, and all of your account information will be permanently deleted.”

Founded in 2008 by Chul Lee and Kyu Lee and Byron Ma, Thoora aimed to offer its users a new way to “discover, monitor, and share the best of the web: by creating living bodies of knowledge.”  The Toronto-based startup  first launched its online news delivery platform  in private beta in 2009, but only just released it to the public this September. Thoora separated its platform from competitors like Curated.by and Scoop.it with “algorithm filtered content” using over 100 different “signals” like site rank, Twitter activity and topic popularity. Thoora raised  $4.17M in seed funded from Rogers Communications in 2009. You find more about what this means for your Thoora account in their blog post.